Drummond: Built on Discipline

John Falconetti, CEO of Jacksonville, Florida-based Drummond, goes to work each day with a specific goal: to create a “world-class” client experience. Adopting a service mindset is one way to reach that goal: Be a company that does what it says it will do, exactly when it says it will do it.

That straightforward, yet often overlooked, philosophy has helped earn Drummond — a PRINTING United Alliance member — a reputation as an industry innovator. As the third-generation company has evolved since its founding in 1939, Falconetti has never forgotten Drummond’s humble beginnings.

A Foundation for Growth

John Falconetti

Falconetti’s grandparents, Johnny and “Peaches” Drummond, were among those reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. The couple built Drummond, a commercial printing business, out of necessity — they needed to provide stability for their family.

Like many family-owned printers, a young Falconetti spent summers at the shop, moving around departments and sweeping floors before joining Drummond full time in 1989. He was first assigned to operations before his father, who had been with the company since the early 1960s, handed him a box of business cards.

“I remember asking him where my list of house accounts that he was going to assign me were,” Falconetti recalls. “He said, ‘Son, you have a box of business cards, you go get your own accounts.’ I got it.”
Falconetti moved into sales, where he remains active — even with his current CEO title. He refers to himself as a “seller owner.”

Under Falconetti’s guidance, what began as that little print shop currently has six locations (three in Atlanta, Georgia, two in Jacksonville, Florida, and one in Detroit, Michigan).

Shaping the Modern Company

When Falconetti thinks about the modern era of Drummond, he sees clear inflection points. In 2005, Falconetti, a burgeoning leader, made a deliberate decision to lead in operational efficiency and enabling technology. Despite Drummond’s proven success, Falconetti knew the company could be even better. Determining the “how” required some research.

Falconetti, a self-described “process data analytics guy,” was drawn to the concept of lean manufacturing. “We brought in a lean coach for just about a year, and it really began to change our ethos and our culture, the way we looked at process improvement, variance reporting, and so forth in a very different structured way,” Falconetti says.

He went on to say that the whole idea of lean manufacturing has evolved and is now conceptually merged with Lean/Six Sigma, a platform that Drummond adopted.

“Lean/Six Sigma is a journey,” Falconetti explains. “You kind of never arrive, but you get up every day and just try to get a little better.”

That shift marked another turning point for Drummond. The company’s vision moved toward operational excellence through Lean manufacturing. By 2010, Falconetti says Drummond committed to owning the manufacturing lifecycle and investing in a proprietary technology platform focused on fulfillment, warehousing, and logistics. It also needed to control the production life cycle for most branded materials (e.g., print, direct mail, signage and graphics, promotional products, apparel, etc.).

“While print is foundational to who we are, Drummond today uses advanced manufacturing and technology to solve complex brand execution challenges for our clients with consistency and scale,” Falconetti adds.

That decision has carried Drummond into 2026 with one notable change that Falconetti observed about a decade ago.

“Our vernacular, our client-facing conversations began to change around 2015,” he says. “That’s when we would finish a presentation and, more often than not, our clients would say, ‘This has been a great conversation. You don’t talk like anybody else that we have spoken to.’ That’s a compliment. We want to talk about solutions, we want to talk about value, we want to talk about ROI, and that really helped feed our growth over these years.”

With a heavy investment in IT security, that Lean/Six Sigma later matured into ISO 27001 certification, SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, and HIPAA certification — making Drummond an ideal partner for industries such as healthcare and financial sectors.

A Path Forward

Drummond’s growth has also continued through acquisitions, guided by a regionally focused strategy centered primarily in the Atlanta market. Over the past 14 years, that approach has resulted in approximately 10 highly strategic transactions that expanded the company’s capabilities, technology, and reach. A few, however, stand out to Falconetti.

He highlights the acquisitions of Sunbelt Printing and ProGraphics Communications — two Atlanta-based companies purchased in Q1 2018. At the time, Drummond was operating in a different facility in Marietta, Georgia, which Falconetti says was the result of a different acquisition.

“I took my company and we did a reverse tuck-in, moved into the ProGraphics facility, and closed down Sunbelt and moved them into ProGraphics,” he says. “So, we had to merge three cultures.”

Falconetti has a distinct approach to M&A. He’s not interested in buying revenue or being big for the sake of being “big.” For Falconetti, an attractive deal must hit three criteria: cultural alignment and shared values; greater value for Drummond’s clients; and new opportunities for its team members.

“I have a well-defined litmus test that I share with our sellers at the first meeting,” he says. “Put it all on the table. I encourage either one of us, either party, to disengage early if we are not perfectly aligned, or if we do not have a sense of peace around our conversations.”

In early 2025, Drummond acquired Tucker Castleberry Printing and New London Communications within a 90-day period. The company then took a phased approach to consolidating offset and digital production at its expanded Chamblee, Georgia, facility, supported by a $3 million investment in automation and capacity.

Falconetti admits the process was complex, but it came with gains. “It delivered meaningful operational efficiencies and performance improvements that exceeded expectations by year’s end,” he says. “Most importantly, these decisions enhance long-term stability, improve predictability, and deliver greater value to both our clients and our team.”

Falconetti stresses that Drummond’s presence in Jacksonville will remain significant, anchored by a major warehouse and logistics operation, along with back-office functions such as accounting and several senior management roles.

Customer Experience First

Early on, Drummond learned that customer perception matters as much as machine performance. Sometimes, the two can complement each other. When Drummond evaluates technology, it must check off several boxes:

• Deliver innovation
• Offer client support
• Bring faster speed to market
• Provide unparalleled customer experience

“To remain disciplined, we operate under a rolling three-year capital investment plan, with each investment evaluated and prioritized based on its internal rate of return and long-term strategic value,” Falconetti says.
That discipline extends to artificial intelligence (AI), a nod to Drummond’s company tagline: “Experience reimagined.” Known as an analytical company, Drummond is using technology across the organization.
Falconetti says AI allows the company to take data it already uses to create regularly measured KPIs — often in real time — and go further. Drummond can take raw data from the operations and finance sides of the business, load it into AI, and ask it to help them understand stories they don’t yet see.

“AI helps us understand the different dynamics affecting a vertical market that we might otherwise have no knowledge about,” Falconetti says. “We can now be more sensitive to the dynamics our clients are under and have more proactive conversations with them around easing their pain points. In that way, AI has helped make us an even more empathetic partner to many of our clients.”

Then there’s automation. The year 2025 was kind to Drummond. Falconetti points to the company’s three-year CapEx plan to reinvest about $3 million at the beginning of the year.

“I spent that $3 million in the first six months of 2025,” he notes. “The good thing was we had already proactively gotten into the practice of CapEx planning, both on the investment side as well as nailing it down to the piece of equipment we would want.”

Falconetti cites a Komori eight-color, 40" perfecting UV press that cut standard makeready times from 30 minutes to five to seven minutes, and increased run speeds from 10,000 to 12,000 sph to 15,000.

“As our business continued to grow, our capacity grew so significantly that we really had to start looking at a lot more automation in our bindery because that became the bottleneck,” he says. “We were kicking out so many finished sheets of paper an hour that it’s everything we can do just to get it cut, folded, stitched, and out the door.”

An Achievement Realized

Falconetti is not just a “seller owner,” he’s a determined owner. When he thinks back to 1989, he estimates annual revenue was $3 million — a figure that wouldn’t have qualified Drummond to appear on Printing Impressions’ PI 300 (then PI 400). As a reminder of where the company was headed, he pinned that issue to his office wall and wrote “Top 100.”

He learned, listened, and worked hard. Drummond made the Top 100 in 2020, coming in at No. 93. In 2025, he was No. 73 with $71.14 million in annual revenue. It’s a milestone Falconetti won’t forget.

That said, he wants to make one thing clear: “We don’t wake up the next day and say, ‘Hey, we’re successful because we sold X many millions of dollars.’ We figure the scoreboard is going to take care of itself. What we’ll continue to focus on is retention. ... The objective is sustainable, profitable, and predictable growth.”